East Idaho News
@eastidnews·585K subscribers·7.7K videos
UPS driver saves Idaho family from house fire
Posted
June 22, 2016
Views
3,162
Likes
22
Comments
2
Engagement
0.76%
June 22, 2016
3,162
22
2
0.76%
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
See what was published immediately before and after this episode.
2:13Now PlayingRIRIE - A local mother is praising the heroic actions of a United Parcel Service driver after he likely saved her and her sons from a potentially deadly house fire.
Michelle Evans and her two boys were at their rural Ririe home on the Swan Valley Highway when the fire broke out around 2 a.m. May 20. Her husband was out of town and Evans was asleep when she heard her dogs barking outside.
"I ran to the window and saw something parked down the street that looked like a semi-truck," Evans tells EastIdahoNews.com. "I almost went back to bed but thought twice. When I looked closer, I saw a man at the gate trying to push it open."
Evans opened the window and asked what the man was doing.
"He yelled, 'Get out of your house! Your house is on fire! You have to get out now!," Evans recalls.
The man at the gate was Sheldon Bonnell, a freight driver for UPS. Every day he makes the early morning drive in his semi-truck from Idaho Falls to Jackson Hole, Wyoming and back again.
"About two and a half miles from their home, I could see what I thought was a brush fire," Bonnell says. "As I got closer, I realized it wasn't a brush fire but an actual building."
Bonnell pulled off the road and saw the Evans' garage behind the home fully engulfed in flames. Large tree limbs above the garage were burning and siding on the house was beginning to melt.
Bonnell broke through the fence and started to yell.
Evans ran downstairs, grabbed her boys and bolted from the home. Bonnell made sure the dogs were safe and carried the Evans' pet lamb across the street as they all waited for fire crews to arrive.
"Inside I had no idea anything was going on," Evans says. "Our house is stone and we wouldn't have heard anything until the fire was inside the house."
Firefighters arrived 13 minutes after Bonnell stopped to help. Crews were able to gain control of the fire before it spread to the home but the garage, with multiple motorcycles inside, is considered a complete loss.
Investigators believe a heat lamp warming chickens near the garage fell over and may have started the fire.
"The next car went by the house nine minutes later so me being there at that particular moment was kind of lucky," Bonnell says. "I’m so happy the Evans were able to get out safe and only lose their garage is that’s what had to be lost."
Evans says she will never be able to repay Bonnell and she knows that if he hadn't stopped to help, this story would likely have a tragic ending.
"He’s my hero," she says. "I’ve never had a hero before but I'd definitely say he saved me and my boys that night."
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
